Posts by podgerama

Trend are a bunch of idiots who dont understand networks or the chaos they cause

They tried this a few years ago and it affected my company and all of our clients. they listed the range 194.54.0.0/16 as a source of spam. My company is a small UK ISP, and we have a range of 1024 ip addresses in that range. Trend refused to talk to us because we were not from InterCard, a German company who owns 194.54.0.0 to 194.54.3.255. Being totally unable to comprehend that the /16 range was split into lots of /22 networks or smaller Trend just blocked an arbitrary range plucked from their arses. We had over 200 clients unable to send mail.

Despite offering to send them through all the information from RIPE, they still refused to listen to the fact that intercard did not own the whole /16 range, so I emailed TheRegister, and was soon speaking with Dan Goodin. Trends defence was "you are in a bad neighbourhood on the internet" my reply was "you are allegedly a reputation service, if my neighbour has a criminal record, does that mean i must have one as well? as that is what your reputation service is insinuating with this blanket ban of addresses". After an hour or so of back and forths, someone who was in charge of the company braincell realised they screwed up and removed the block that they initially said would take a week to remove!

I will never recommend the use of Trends services to anyone for anything, i wouldnt touch them with a stolen bargepole.

Greg hit one part well on the head, shovelware. Many developers just changed a control or two to require a waggle and hey presto it must now be fun. Wii sports was brilliant for being able to pick up and play. my mother and aunt both love tennis and they took to it straight away, it was much easier for them than a tennis game on an xbox or ps3. Lazy game developers and a controller that doesn't always do what you tell it have combined to me only buying two games in the last 2 years on that platform.

As for their other cash cow, the handhelds, IOS has made a lot of people evaluate games differently. some of the games on the handhelds that you can pick up for £15 online for a ds i wouldnt even pay 69p for in the appstore.

I would not lay blame at Nintendos intellectual property, they have some of the strongest franchises in gaming. Mario, Zelda, Metroid et al are not to blame for poor sales. Gaming has changed, The online experience on any nintendo console is leagues behind microsoft, sony and even apple. The masses 3rd party shovelware make you weary of impluse buying, and compared to other platforms some games feel to expensive.

i had a job over christmas at uni way back in the late nineties. I was installing training systems in branches of lloyds tsb bank. I was working all over the country, previously before this job the furthest i had driven from my home (i had only been driving for a few months) was 50 miles from leafy surrey to bluewater in kent.

I worked in central london, hull, leeds, newcastle and south wales over the course of this job, and i managed to navigate my way everywhere with nothing but an AA atlas.

while it is possible to get where you need to go using good old fashioned paper maps, the minute you hit a built up area you don't know, you are in trouble. Try finding somewhere legal to pull over for five minutes in london while you check your A-Z, the cctv cameras will be all over you and you will get some lovely letters through the post delightfully telling you you have won the chance to pay westminster council the princely sum of £80.

Sat navs are a great aid, and in some cases a complete god send, but as has been said, people who are stupid enough to follow them without question are..well..stupid. I have co-pilot on my smartphone, it does what i need, it gets free updates, it gives me a backup when need reassurance on a route. its no replacement for actual knowledge, but who has the time to learn all the routes they need to take ahead of time?.